homesickness; yearning; wistfulness

knowledge, belief, and faith

This is a post about what words mean and why atheists and theists sometimes find themselves missing each other’s points in the middle. It’s also a list of suggestions: Things to Please Stop Saying to Atheists, Please, We Beg You.

How can you know for sure there’s no god? The universe is vast. What if science just hasn’t found him/her/it yet?

Atheists don’t say we know for sure that there’s no god. This is a common misconception. Atheism/theism is about what you believe. Agnosticism/gnosticism is about what you know. For the last several years that I was a Christian, I thought of myself as an agnostic Christian. I didn’t know if God existed, but I chose to believe in him because I wanted to. There are other Christians who say they Know – with a capital K – that God exists. How, I don’t know. But they do. In the same way, there are agnostic and gnostic atheists. You won’t find very many of the latter, if you come across one at all, because most atheists would say that we can’t know for certain that there’s no being out there, say, hanging out in the Andromeda galaxy. Atheists simply don’t believe that there’s a god because we have seen no evidence for such an entity. Unless and until we do, we will not believe in it.

Atheism is just another religion.

Friends. Friends. You must stop saying this. It annoys the hell out of atheists, and it puzzles us as well because it sounds like you’re denigrating religion. Atheists don’t worship anything. We don’t have faith in anything (more about that below). Atheists don’t have a set of rules to follow or dogmas to believe. To borrow a common quote, “Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hairstyle.” If I have any religion, it’s Jane Austen, okay? Atheism is not a religion. If you think it is, then I’m not sure what you think a religion is.

So you don’t believe in anything?

Um… what? I said I don’t believe in any gods. How on earth does that translate into not believing in anything? I really don’t understand where people get this.

It takes more faith to be an atheist. / I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. / You just put your faith in science. / Ohhhh, you lost your faith? *sad look*(etc)

Here’s what I really want to talk about in this post, and that’s faith. The virtue that is no virtue at all.

There are general usage definitions of faith that we need to clear up first. There’s faith in the sense of trust (I have every faith in that politician), and there’s faith in the sense of hope (I have faith that we can do this). Under those definitions, sure, I have faith in things. But I prefer to call my feelings trust and hope, which is what they are, just to avoid confusion. I trust science. Absolutely. But that’s not really what people mean by faith, is it?

Faith is belief without (or even in spite of) evidence. If you have evidence, it’s not faith. When Thomas touched the holes in Jesus’ hands, his belief in the resurrection was not based on faith. Thomas doubted. Thomas wanted evidence. “Doubting Thomas” was the hero of that story.

“Follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Neil DeGrasse Tyson said on the last episode of Cosmos. I would add, “…and not one step farther.”

You should never believe anything for which you have no evidence.

You should never believe anything for which you have no evidence.

Has anyone ever told you, “You just have to have faith”? Or “That’s where faith comes in”? I’m sure you have. That’s what you hear when you reach the point in a conversation where reason and evidence have been exhausted. Next time someone tells you that you just need to have faith, maybe you could say, “Why?” Why should I reject reason and pretend that evidence doesn’t matter in order to believe something that others have simply asserted? I don’t need faith, and thanks but no thanks, I don’t want it.

When I hear “You just have to have faith” now, what I hear is, “This is where you’re gonna need to turn your brain off.”

I trust (TRUST, not “have faith in”) science because it never asks for faith. Never ever ever.Ever. Science doesn’t say, “And we’re a little fuzzy here, so that’s where faith comes in.” Science says, “One interesting hypothesis is such-and-such, though there’s not enough evidence yet to say conclusively that this happened.” Science says – gasps and horrors! – “We don’t know.” For some reason, there are people who think that’s some kind of chink in the armor.

In Bill Nye’s widely publicized “debate” (that seems rather too complimentary for what that was) with six-day creationist Ken Ham, Nye was asked how life began. (Side note: the question was irrelevant because abiogenesis, the origin of life, has nothing to do with evolution by natural selection.) He replied that we don’t know yet. And, boy, did Ken Ham pounce. “I know!” he said proudly, and recommended that Nye read the Bible.

Two hundred years ago, we didn’t yet know how disease works. Now we have the germ theory. We didn’t know what made up matter. Now we have atomic theory. (PS – ever heard either of those referred to as “just a theory”? Yeah, me neither.)

This urge to plug God in when you reach the limit of current understanding is called “God of the gaps.” The term was coined by Christians – not scientists – who wanted their fellow believers to stop doing this. I’ll quote one of my all-time heroes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

[H]ow wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.

There’s simply no better way to say any of it than that.

I didn’t lose my faith. I don’t have faith in science. I don’t need to believe an explanation made up by Bronze Age barbarians because I’m too uncomfortable to say, “We don’t know that yet.” I don’t have faith in anything, and I don’t want it.

Everything I believe, to the best of my ability, is because I have evidence for it. That’s the virtue to strive for. Faith? Empty, meaningless garbage asserted by others and accepted for no good reason. If you think that’s a virtue, good luck with it.